02/16/2027
Searching, surprising essays from the acclaimed author of Believers.
Lisa Wells grew up in the Pacific Northwest among rebels and rockers, kids from broken homes united by their love of art. She found her way to writing, especially poetry. In Delinquents, Wells writes about making sense of life and making a life as an artist. From sacrificing stability for artistic freedom to the particular intimacy of road trips, from the devastations of loving people who are in pain (while working through your own) to the impossible reconciliations of death, to the pilgrimage that is motherhood, these essays are deeply personal and insistently outward-looking. Drawing on psychology, philosophy, pop culture, and voracious reading, Wells charts a path from the chaos of childhood to the hard-won, still-precarious stability of adulthood.
Candid, funny, dark, and profound, Delinquents is a fierce testament to improvising a life of your own from whatever means are available.
Praise for Delinquents
“Wise, wry, and burned clean by passing through the fire, Lisa Wells is the writer we need now. Delinquents has the best essay you’ll ever read about Whitesnake’s ‘Here I Go Again,’ but takes us past that, too, into parenthood, poetry, the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, and then further still, beyond words, into unspeakable loss.”
—J. D. DANIELS, author of The Correspondence
"Lisa Wells is one of my favorite living essayists, and with Delinquents she's delivered her most beautiful and haunting work yet. There are paragraphs and sentences in this book so sharp, it feels like you picked up the wrong end of a scalpel."
—STEPHEN MARKLEY, author of The Deluge